33. Optical Self(s)

The Missing Body - Video Art Exhibition - French Institut Algiers (Algeria) In Algerian society, the human body is subject to social and religious codifications that condition appearance and body language. To address the question of the body in videos made by artists in Algeria raises aesthetic and ethical issues that require elucidation and elaboration. Nevertheless, certain Algerian artists have not failed to initiate us to this subject in their videographic and cinematic expressions, although their work has rarely been brought together and exhibited in the context of a single curatorial program. In June 2014 at the Institut français in Algiers, I curated the video art exhibition, Le corps manquant (The missing body), which offered up this “video body” for experimentation. The distinct proposal of this exhibition leads me to present several additional works in which the video image testifies to an avowed interest in corporality, as much in the processes used as in the figured visual content. Why such apprehension about the body and fear of its reflection in the mirror of the video image? Do Algerian artists envision extricating this body from its socio-ethical codifications?

My paper seeks to explore interlinks between gender, photography and pleasure and how gender is mediated through photography in the works of Barbara Kruger, Orlan and Cindy Sherman, who use the female, gendered and erotic body in order to rewrite the parameters of happiness and 'jouissance' by producing ad-scapes and photographs which bespeak the suture between the 'femaleness' of identity and the stereotypical notions of aesthetic female beauty as they are valorised and canonised in the West. In the first instance, the photographs themselves serve as an instance of the commodification of desire and pleasure in consumerist culture. Yet beyond their fetishistic value, they also exemplify an attempt to undermine phallogocentric discourse and the objectifying, 'penetrating' and all-seeing male gaze. By drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Cadava, Benjamin, Barthes and Sontag I hope to show that although such photographic representations can be extremely empowering and engaging in light of the various provocative issues they raise in relation to gender and the female body, they also freeze and stultify the female body in a kind of temporal death by placing it into and within the photographic frame and locking it into a framework of reciprocal (mostly male) gazes and exchanges.

Somatechnics, 2018

Swedish-Sámi filmmaker and artist Liselotte Wajstedt and her experimental road movie documentary Sámi Nieida Jojk (Sámi Daughter Yoik, 2007) provide a unique insight into displaced Indigenous identity. To explore her mother’s repressed Sámi ancestry, Wajstedt uses an eclectic mix of techniques, including animation, collage illustrations, photographs, and superimposition. Throughout the film, Wajstedt uses her body as a physical canvas, projecting images of her autobiographical journey onto herself. These methods contribute to a sense of metamorphosis, where the filmmaker plays with and challenges conventional Sámi representations through film form. I propose that somatechnics, a concept that describes a reciprocal relationship between the body and technology, provides a helpful way of understanding Wajstedt’s work. I argue that cinema can work as a somatechnic tool that can help unpack the Indigenous body as a symbol of cultural, geopolitical, and ethnic identity politics. I also explore Sámi Daughter Yoik as a nomadic film, arguing that the somatechnic potential of cinema is most evident when themes of space, transition, and the body converge to create a more fluid understanding of Sámi identity onscreen.

Oxford Art Journal, 2021

Under the Skin and Fashioning the Modern Middle East reveal the important place of fashion and dress, photography, gender, and sexuality in charting how multiple modernities have been 'embodied' within the artistic practices and visual cultures of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Both books draw on post-colonial approaches and illuminate imperialist and Orientalist narratives at work in the visual and material culture of the MENA region post 1800, and both are interested in charting histories that are often maligned, forgotten, or elided. They also illustrate an interest in how gender and its embodiment function in relationships, encounters, and practices that traverse geographical, cultural, and corporeal borders; in the course of these two works we move from the biopolitics of traversing the Israel/Palestine divide, to the role of intermarriage within Turkish Sudan, and from the complexity of defining indigenous, Arab, and Muslim identities in former European colonies to analyses of female masculinity, the self-fashioning of manumitted bodies, and practices of life drawing in Muslim-majority countries. In 1992, Yeddida K. Stilman and Nancy Micklewright lamented that whilst study of fashion, clothing, and material culture was well advanced for European history, it was less so for the Islamic World. 1 However, a burgeoning field of work has emerged in the last thirty years addressing the interrelated fields of fashion, the body, gender, and visual culture. The essays in Fashioning the Middle East contribute to many of the emerging themes within this field. Essays by Micklewright and Mary Roberts address a recurrent interest in the way ideas about fashion and the body shuttled back and forth between the Middle East and Europe that expands previous approaches to women's costume from the borders of the Mediterranean to the Arab peninsula through a specifically Ottoman lens. 2 The impact of photography, mass print, and other media, discussed in the chapters by

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2002

GIS - Gesto, Imagem e Som - Revista de Antropologia

Signs, 2015

In Visual Pleasure, Laura Mulvey describes how human curiosity and the desire to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. 1 Mulvey's analysis of scopophilia, deriving pleasure from looking, emphasizes recognition and misrecognition in objectivity and self-image. " The image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior, projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject." (Ibid., 17) Consequently, this misrecognition is caused by the gendered difference in spectator and image representation. Mulvey argues that there is a "determining male gaze" in mainstream cinema, which "projects its fantasy onto the female figure," creating a split between the active male and passive female. 2 For this reason, the scopophilic pleasure in looking by way of cinematic forms continues to determine the female body as a sexual object.